


you dream (of some epiphany)

by Ceara_Einin



Series: Saving What We Love - 2020 [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Finn Needs A Hug (Star Wars), Finn starts to use the Force, Force-Sensitive Finn (Star Wars), Gen, Implied Poe Dameron/Finn, Minor Character Death, POV Finn (Star Wars), Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Stormtrooper Rebellion (Star Wars), because we deserved a stormtrooper rebellion, not quite canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:01:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28135110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ceara_Einin/pseuds/Ceara_Einin
Summary: Finn knows he can't be the only stormtrooper with a change of heart. The others just need a chance to do the right thing. They need hope that the First Order isn't all there is. He just needs to figure out how to help them see that.
Relationships: Poe Dameron & Finn
Series: Saving What We Love - 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2057262
Kudos: 11





	you dream (of some epiphany)

**Author's Note:**

> Day 2 of #SavingWhatWeLove 2020  
> Prompt: Playing A Role – What is hidden behind the mask?

He’s back in the village, surrounded by fire and painted in blood.

Finn visits this place in his dreams, sometimes. Ever since Rey’s been teaching him about the Force, he’s gotten better at noticing the signs. Starting in random spots, no memory of what came before, the slightest sense of being an outsider looking in. If he remembers to match his thumb against the pads of his other fingers, at least one doesn’t quite meet up correctly.

This time, he knows from the smell. His first steps onto Jakku smelled acrid and stale, a mix of sunbaked sand cooled slightly in the night and a hail of blaster fire. Finn tried to count how many bolts blew from his blaster, but there were too many to count. He can never see if they hit anyone. In dreams, when he tries to reach out and feel for death in the Force, he finds only a blank gray slate.

This time, he smells his sweat and nothing else. Not surprising, given the helmet snug around his head, but not quite right. The first hit of kicked-up sand and blaster fire smoke hit his nose first. The overpowering smell of his sweat came later, when he’d been running through the village (Tuanul, wasn’t it?) and a blaster bolt killed his friend. Squad member. Both? It was hard to find friends in Phasma’s unit, where ruthlessness was the one thing always rewarded. But sometimes, Finn found others like him who weren’t so ready to throw themselves on the altar of the First Order. Slip was one of them.

One time, in the middle of a late mess hall dinner with Poe wolfing down rations and stew like he was born to do it, he asked Finn about the village.

“Can’t get Tekka out of my head, sometimes,” Poe said. “He’d said, ‘This will begin to make things right.’ Never got him to say what, exactly. Too late now.”

Finn stared into his stew for a moment too long, the shape of his blaster rifle a phantom against his palms. “Yeah,” he says. “Never quite understood why Ren had everyone killed. But then, I didn’t understand most of the First Order’s reasons for anything.”

Poe nodded, his head sinking toward his shoulders as if the weight of the war was, in that moment, too heavy. “Never thought a stormtrooper would bust me out, you know. I didn’t think any of you thought beyond orders.”

Finn asked it too casually, too easily as he chewed through a mouthful of water bread. “S’that why you shot my friend? Though I guess we were shooting at you too.”

Poe’s next mouthful of stew splattered as his spoon drops back into the bowl. “That was your friend?”

Finn nodded, filling his mouth with stew and a chunk of mystery meat. “Yeah. I was the trooper with blood on my helmet.”

“Kriff.” Poe reached across the table only to draw back before their hands touch. “Finn, I- ”

“It’s fine,” Finn interrupted. “It just bothers me sometimes, you know? We’re fighting the First Order like everyone in it is the same. And I’m proof they’re not.” Finn tears off another piece of bread and soaks it with the slightly-watery stew. “I don’t want to kill anyone else who doesn’t need to die.”

Poe fell quiet enough Finn had to fill the silence with more eating, but he spoke gentler than Finn expected. “You’re right,” Poe said. “I guess I – all of us, really – got so focused on defeating the First Order we forgot there must still be people like you in there.”

The taste of smoke, blood, and shocked grief flooded Finn’s mouth, overpowering the taste of mess hall stew and rationed water bread. “Everyone like me,” he said, “they’re just waiting for the right chance to seize. Like I did.”

Poe picked up his spoon and tapped it against the bottom of his half-empty bowl, his brow knitted together and eyebrows low like he always got when he turned an idea over in his head. “So we give them one,” he said.

Maybe that’s why this one dream keeps coming back. There’s something here he needs to see, some reason or chance he can give the other stormtroopers to choose the Resistance. Choose the light.

Finn slows to a walk, fires bursting up around him from the flametroopers focused on flushing out the villagers from their huts. Now that he knows it’s a dream, he can keep from repeating everything as it happened. In his own footsteps, at least.

Technically, the blaster bolts shouldn’t be able to hurt him here. But Finn ducks on instinct anyway; some things, he still hasn’t unlearned even after nearly a full standard year in the Resistance. He scans the battlefield as slowly as he dares. There’s the old man Ren kills later, walking like a ghost among the flames. There in the opposite direction by the X-wing is Poe, firing blue bolts over a sand dune. One, two troopers fall. The third is his friend, FN-2003. Slip. The one who fell behind all the time in training exercises. Finn rescued him enough times that Phasma chewed him out, something about weak links and First Order strength. But here, in this battle (massacre, really), Finn needed to save Slip all over again.

This was the time he couldn’t. Even here in the dream, Finn can’t let him die alone. Slip dies quickly, but this time his hand clasps Finn’s weakly in his last moments. Finn isn’t quick enough to wish away his gloves. That’s show it should be – human to human, brothers clasping hands one last time.

Is that the lesson? Compassion for the fallen? For those who fall short of the First Order’s demands? Or compassion for a brother?

Finn stands with Slip’s blood slick on his right glove and looks to the other fallen troopers. Most lay exactly as they fell, face down or flat on their back with a smoking hole in their chestplate or helmet. Two have someone mourning them – just looking down, but in the middle of a battle, it’s something – but by and large, his unit seems to be unconcerned with death. They have orders to destroy the village and round up everyone in it.

Finn looks down at Slip again. Is his face pale under that mask? Does he look like a frightened boy, or a fallen young man? Is there a difference?

Slip wasn’t happy or willing to die for the First Order’s cause, not in his heart. Finn wasn’t either, so he left. There must be others. Finn closes his eyes and reaches out, lets the Force take him by the hand and guide him.

He brushes against their minds, gently, like Rey taught him. Some are dark red, pulsing with the heat and adrenaline of battle. Some are soft orange, ill-at-ease with burning Tuanul and its villagers but unwilling to risk their own necks to stop it. Resigned. Some are thick with shadows and the chill of enjoying the power, enjoying making others scream and feeling their lives hanging on a captain’s order. But some, at least a fifth, are bright reds and yellows and golds, lit up with the injustice of it all. Those minds are the candles holding the answer right in front of him, because those flames jump every time one of its bearers sees another fallen brother.

 _This isn’t right_ , they think. _This isn’t worth it._

Finn opens his eyes, squints out from the mask as a fellow trooper brings him to the circle with the others just before Ren comes stomping down the ramp.

Brothers. Sisters. The stormtroopers are programmed like computers, trained like animals, but they’re also something the First Order never intended to make. Something like family, bonded by the loss of their own.

Family that looks out for each other when they can, because how else could anyone but the most ruthless survive in the ranks? Behind their masks, they are family.

Finn pulls off his mask and wakes up with a chill over his forehead and the Force a bright wave all around him. Two breaths, just two breaths to steady himself. Then he’s off and running for Poe, bare feet slapping on the spongy earth of Ajan Kloss. He charges into Poe’s tent without hesitation – it’s not the first time he’s woken Poe in the middle of the night.

Poe jerks awake at moment Finn throws open the tent flap.

“We need to get a message out to the troopers,” Finn says, words all jumbled together in the rush. “I know what to say.”


End file.
